Troubleshoot a network? No problem. Write a 3,000 word article on Kubernetes cloud container management? When do you want it. Talk to a few hundred people about Linux's history? Been there, done that. Manage a business's delivery routing and shift scheduling? I'll break out in a cold sweat.

If you too find the nuts and bolts of business processing management a nightmare, you'll want to check out Red Hat's latest program: Red Hat Decision Manager 7.

According to the developer, the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.13 desktop environment release will start a full second faster than previous versions because of the removal of the QmlObjectIncubationController component, which apparently slowed down the entire desktop, and promises to let users pin apps on the panel that contain spaces in their desktop file names.

Goodies are also coming to the upcoming KDE Applications 18.04 software suite this spring, which makes creating of new files with the Dolphin file manager instantaneous, improves drag-and-drop support from Spectacle to Chromium, and lets users configure the Gwenview image viewer to no longer display the image action buttons on thumbnails when they hover with the mouse cursor over them.

For those curious about the state of Intel's open-source Mesa OpenGL driver relative to the company's closed-source Windows OpenGL driver, here are some fresh benchmark results when making use of an Intel Core i7 8700K "Coffee Lake" processor with UHD Graphics 630 and testing from Windows 10 Pro x64 against Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS, Ubuntu with the Linux 4.16 Git kernel and Mesa 18.1-dev, and then Intel's own Clear Linux distribution.

Do those same developers need IBM? Developers certainly benefit from IBM's investments in open source, but it's not as clear that those same developers have much to gain from IBM's cloud. Google, for example, has done a stellar job open sourcing code like TensorFlow and Kubernetes that feeds naturally into running related workloads on Google Cloud Platform. Aside from touting its Java bonafides, however, IBM has yet to demonstrate that developers get significant benefits for modern workloads on its cloud.

That's IBM's big challenge: Translating its open source expertise into real, differentiated value for developers on its cloud.

Most people tend to forget that despite Ubuntu's success over the years, it's still just a distro based on another distro - Debian. Debian on its own, however, isn't really well suited for newer users...hence the explosion of distros based on Debian over the recent years. There are lot of great choices for Linux users. Which one is best for you?

Inforce Computing’s $250 Inforce 6320 is a compact (170 x 95 x 42mm) IoT gateway that runs Ubuntu Core (Snappy) and Debian on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 410E. Inforce promises “periodic upstream kernel based BSP releases [that] include in-depth documentation along with a host of royalty-free software.” The Debian BSP includes LXDE, drivers for all available interfaces, as and access to the Inforce TechWeb tech support services.

AWS customers that are running SAP workloads on Suse Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications -- a leading platform for SAP Hana and SAP S/4Hana -- will get integrated and streamlined support from AWS and Suse under the agreement.

AWS customers will be able to buy the Suse Linux Enterprise on demand, so they will pay only for what they use.

"This isn't an evolution, but a further support statement that showcases how this new relationship better enables AWS and Suse to deliver SAP solutions on AWS," said Tom Hammond-Doel, AWS global alliance director.

Besides x86_64, we have seen Spectre mitigation work happen recently for ARM, POWER, and IBM s390, but no prominent MIPS activity to report until now.

The Spectre Variant Two vulnerability affects P5600 and P6600 chips while as part of their mitigation strategy is a new LLVM patch that was just merged and introduces a -mindirect-jump=hazard switch. This is different from the Variant Two mitigation technique on x86 of Retpolines.

Software Heritage is the project for which I’ve been working during the past two and a half years now. The grand vision of the project is to build the universal software archive, which will collect, preserve and share the Software Commons.

Today, we’ve announced that Software Heritage is archiving the contents of Debian daily. I’m reposting this article on my blog as it will probably be of interest to readers of Planet Debian.

TL;DR: Software Heritage now archives all source packages of Debian as well as its security archive daily. Everything is ready for archival of other Debian derivatives as well. Keep on reading to get details of the work that made this possible.

Lots of companies want to collect data about their users. This is a good thing, generally; being data-driven is important, and it’s jolly hard to know where best to focus your efforts if you don’t know what your people are like. However, this sort of data collection also gives people a sense of disquiet; what are you going to do with that data about me? How do I get you to stop using it? What conclusions are you drawing from it? I’ve spoken about this sense of disquiet in the past, and you can watch (or read) that talk for a lot more detail about how and why people don’t like it.

So, what can we do about it? As I said, being data-driven is a good thing, and you can’t be data-driven if you haven’t got any data to be driven by. How do we enable people to collect data about you without compromising your privacy?

Well, there are some ways. Before I dive into them, though, a couple of brief asides: there are some people who believe that you shouldn’t be allowed to collect any data on your users whatsoever; that the mere act of wanting to do so is in itself a compromise of privacy. This is not addressed to those people. What I want is a way that both sides can get what they want: companies and projects can be data-driven, and users don’t get their privacy compromised. If what you want is that companies are banned from collecting anything… this is not for you. Most people are basically OK with the idea of data collection, they just don’t want to be victimised by it, now or in the future, and it’s that property that we want to protect.

Similarly, if you’re a company who wants to know everything about each individual one of your users so you can sell that data for money, or exploit it on a user-by-user basis, this isn’t for you either. Stop doing that.

There are an awful lot of bugs filed against Firefox and all it's components in the course of a release. Keeping on top of that is hard and some teams have adopted some policies to help with that (for example see: design-decision-needed).

Having a consistent approach to bugs across the organisation makes it a little easier for everyone to get a feel for what's going.

February sees Open Source turn 20 years old. Or the OSI definition at least. According to the OSI, the term was coined in Palo Alto by nanotechnologist Christine Peterson during a meeting on February 3rd, 1998 shortly after the announcement of the release of Netscape’s source code.

By identifying global trends and local needs, EOH is able to proactively source and secure capabilities that will assist with the adoption of the digital revolution. LSD’s offerings across Linux, automation, devops and containers is a great technology fit for EOH to lead open source in the market.

Continuously tracking your application’s dependencies for vulnerabilities and efficiently addressing them is no simple feat. In addition, this is a problem shared by all, and is not an area most companies would consider their core competency. Therefore, it is a great opportunity for the right set of tools to help tackle this concern.

The use of Open Source Software (OSS) has become widespread. The latest statistics show that 78% of companies run OSS, and a number of mainstream software and hardware products are based on the OSS model – for example Android, Skype [sic], Firefox, Amazon Kindle, Tivo and BT Home Hub.

The work involved sex trafficking cases in Latin America, the Caribbean and Southeast Asia. Select students in Marshall’s Open Source Intelligence Exchange program worked to provide open source intelligence collection and analysis for law enforcement and other clients. Open source refers to data collection from publicly available sources.

The move toward “open access” to research and scholarship, far from being a modern digital-age creation, has roots in the West that date back to medieval times, writes a Stanford education scholar. John Willinsky’s new book explains how learning has long benefited from efforts to increase its circulation.

The next OpenStack Summit takes place again in Vancouver (BC, Canada), May 21-25, 2018. The "Vote for Presentations" period started. All proposals are up for community votes. The deadline for your vote is will end February 25 at 11:59pm PST (February 26th at 8:59am CET)

The first-ever INDEX community event, happening now in San Francisco, is an open developer conference featuring sessions on topics including artificial intelligence, machine learning, analytics, cloud native, containers, APIs, languages, and more.

2017 was a fantastic year for the Che project, with more contributors, more commits, and more usage – this solidified Che’s position as the leading developer workspace server and browser IDE. Eclipse Che users logged over 7 million hours of public Che usage (plus more in private installs). We’ll discuss the growing cloud development market, Che’s position in it, and the exciting changes we’re planning for 2018.

The Linux kernel grows at an amazing pace, each kernel release adds more functionality, more drivers and hence more kernel modules. I recently wondered what the trend was for kernel module growth per release, so I performed module builds on kernels v2.6.24 through to v4.16-rc2 for x86-64 to get a better idea of growth rates...

Right now to make most use of the Steam Controller on Linux you need to be using the Steam client while there have been independent user-space programs like SC-Controller to enable Steam Controller functionality without the Steam client running. A new and independent effort is a Linux kernel driver for the Steam Controller.

Through reverse-engineering, Rodrigo Rivas Costa has been developing a kernel driver for the Valve Steam Controller. This driver supports both USB cable and USB wireless adapters for the Steam Controller. This driver is being developed as a proper HID kernel driver so it should work with all existing Linux programs and doesn't require the use of the proprietary Steam client.

David Egts, chief technologist for Red Hat’s public sector, has said federal information technology leaders should take responsibility in ensuring the security of their agencies’ public cloud platforms.

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today introduced Red Hat Decision Manager 7, a decision management platform that simplifies the development and deployment of rules-based applications and services. Red Hat Decision Manager 7 is the next generation of the company’s business rules management offering, Red Hat JBoss BRMS, and is designed to enable organizations to quickly build applications that automate business decisions.

In August 2017, we polled a selection of Red Hat customers to learn more about their motivations for adopting business automation technologies and how they are using them, as well as the role these technologies play in respondents' digital transformation initiatives.

A special report produced by RTInsights in collaboration with Red Hat.

[...]

Worldwide IoT spending is projected to surpass $1 trillion in 2020, with annual growth of 15 percent over the next several years, according to market researcher IDC. IoT solution development benefits from a wide variety of advances across IT including the cloud, big data, mobile, social, and open source.

The open source Nginx 1.13.9 web server debuted today, providing support for a new HTTP/2 standard feature known as Server Push.

The HTTP/2 web standard was completed three years ago in February 2015, with Nginx ahead of the curve in terms of HTTP/2 standard adoption. The NGINX Plus R7 release in September 2015 featured the first commercially supported enterprise-grade support provided by Nginx for HTTP/2.

Watching movies and playing music is one of the primary entertainment purposes served by our computers. So, when you move to a new operating system, it makes perfect sense if you look for useful media players. In the past, we’ve already told you about the best video players for Linux and, in this article, we’ll be telling you about the best music players for Linux-based operating systems. Let’s take a look at them:

VidCutter is an open-source cross-platform video editor with which you can quickly trim and join video clips. It is Python and Qt5-based, uses FFmpeg for its encoding and decoding operations, and it supports all the popular video formats not excluding FLV, MP4, AVI, and MOV.

VidCutter boasts a customizable User Interface that you can personalize using themes and a plethora of settings that you can tweak to make your video editing environment more appealing.

Our philosophy was always to go py2 ￫py2/py3 ￫ py3 because we just could not realistically do a big bang in production, an intuition that was proven right in surprising ways. This meant that 2to3 was a non starter which I think is probably common. We tried a while to use 2to3 to detect Python 3 compatibility issues but quickly found that untenable too. Basically it suggests changes that will break your code in Python 2. No good.

Since Calamares has to run all over the place, and is used in derivatives of all of the “Big Five” Linux distributions, I regularly switch distro’s as a development platform. Also because I inevitably blow up the VM while running Calamares, or because an update renders the system useless. At FOSDEM I had the pleasure of chatting with the folks from the SUSE stand about OpenQA and OBS.

At the heart of every 3D application is geometry. Qt 3D-based 3D applications are no different and require the user to either generate geometry or provide asset files for Qt 3D to load. This blog post demonstrates how Blender and its Python API could be used to write an exporter that generates geometry for Qt 3D.

KDE has received a $200,000 donation from the Pineapple Fund: "With this donation, the Pineapple Fund recognizes that KDE as a community creates software which benefits the general public, advances the use of Free Software on all kinds of platforms, and protects users' privacy by putting first-class and easy to use tools in the hands of the people at zero cost."

We’ve just rolled out a significant and welcome policy change to KDE’s Bugzilla bug tracker: Everyone with an account may now edit any bug without prior permission. This means that every KDE Bugzilla user can now be a bug triager anytime they want!

There is an experimental branch of KDE's KWin window manager / compositor with support for Vulkan compositing.

Over the past week Fredrik Höglund has begun work on KWin Vulkan support so this low-level, high-performance graphics API could be used for compositing rather than OpenGL. So far he charted out a lot of the fundamental Vulkan code and the necessary infrastructure work along with some basic features like for being able to render window shadows and porting some other window effects over to Vulkan.

KDE neon 5.12 is a reasonable distro. It is MUCH better than Kubuntu Aardvark but not as sweet as my 2017 favorite, Zesty Zebra. That said, it had none of the horrible problems that I saw in the 17.10 release. It's fast, there were no real errors, you get multimedia playback out of the box, reasonable smartphone and network support, and the bleeding edge of what Plasma can deliver.

On the other hand, there are some really life-sapping annoyances in the system, which do not belong in year 2018, or even 2008 for that matter. Better hardware support is needed. The decorations need a cleanup. The software arsenal is thin. Discover needs a miracle. Overall, neon behaves like a developer-focused system, and it has that rough, test-commit feel about it. It does try to balance the best of all worlds - an LTS base combined with the latest Plasma, but that's no excuse for sloppy work or bugs.

It can do better, and we have the most splendid Kubuntu 17.04 as the golden benchmark from now on until the end of times, we few, we happy few, we band of geeks, for he who tests with me together, shall be my code brother, may his git ne'er be so vile, and the persons of all genders now in bed shall feel themselves accursed, and hold their VR sets cheap ... I think you get the idea. I got carried away. Let's summarize. KDE neon 5.12, fresh, cool, sleek, needs more apps, better package management, better overall peripheral support. But there's a lot of potential and hope, and I think we will see cool things in Plasma this year. 7.5/10. Worth checking.

In recent years, it has become increasingly important to develop software that minimizes security vulnerabilities. Memory management bugs are a common cause of these vulnerabilities. To that end, the Mozilla community has spent the last several years building the Rust language and ecosystem which focuses primarily on eliminating those bugs. And Rust is available in Fedora today, along with a few applications in Fedora 27 and higher, as seen below.

Google Summer of Code gives students an opportunity to make a substantive contribution to Open Source projects with the motto "Flip bits not burgers" has recruited more mentoring organizations than ever for its 13th year.

The first thing I needed in my journey to learn COBOL was an IDE. I am a big supporter of coding in an integrated development environment (IDE). I like being able to write, test and run code all in one place. Also, I find the support features that an IDE provides, such as visual code structure analysis, code completion and inline syntax checking, allow me to program and debug efficiently.

While Python 3 has been around now for a decade, most Linux distributions are still working towards moving away from Python 2 and that includes Intel's Clear Linux distribution.

Like with Ubuntu, Fedora, and others moving away their base packages from any Python 2 dependencies and moving them to Python 3, Clear Linux developers are working on the same. Arjan van de Ven of Intel provided an update on their Python 3 transitioning. By the end of 2018, but hopefully within the next six months, they hope to be at a point where their performance-oriented Linux distribution is "fully and only Python 3."

Longtime Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst joined Red Hat at the end of last year where his current task is on NIR intermediate representation support for Nouveau as part of bringing SPIR-V compute support to this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver.

For Mesa 18.0 is the initial Intel shader cache support for archiving compiled GLSL shaders on-disk to speed up the load times of subsequent game loads and other benefits. For the Mesa 18.0 release the functionality isn't enabled by default but it will be for Mesa 18.1.

Xorgproto debuted earlier this month as a centralized package of all X.Org protocol headers that used to be versioned and developed independently. Given the slower development now of the xorg-server and lots of the protocols being intertwined, they are now all bundled together. Tuesday marked the 2018.3 release with the new additions for Keith Packard's SteamVR Linux infrastructure work.

Xorgproto 2018.3 offers up the protocol changes for the X.Org Server work that Keith Packard has been doing on improving the virtual reality head-mounted display (VR HMD) support for Linux systems, particularly around SteamVR. The X.Org protocol changes needed are supporting RandR leasing of outputs and also non-desktop monitor handling, so the VR HMD won't be treated as a conventional display and the Linux desktop systems then attempt to make use of it thinking it's just another HDMI/DP display.

While the newly-released Raven Ridge APUs could make for nice HTPC systems given the number of compatible mini-ITX/micro-ATX motherboards and these 65 Watt APUs offering Zen CPU cores with Vega graphics, besides the current problematic Raven Ridge graphics support, there are still some broader AMDGPU DC audio problems for newer graphics cards.

Phoronix reader Fred wrote in today to call attention to the AMDGPU DC audio situation. While AMDGPU DC was merged in Linux 4.15 and provides HDMI/DP audio support to the past few generations of Radeon GPUs on this new display code stack, not all audio formats play nicely.

More in Tux Machines

Why open source could be IBM's key to future success in the cloud

Do those same developers need IBM? Developers certainly benefit from IBM's investments in open source, but it's not as clear that those same developers have much to gain from IBM's cloud. Google, for example, has done a stellar job open sourcing code like TensorFlow and Kubernetes that feeds naturally into running related workloads on Google Cloud Platform. Aside from touting its Java bonafides, however, IBM has yet to demonstrate that developers get significant benefits for modern workloads on its cloud.
That's IBM's big challenge: Translating its open source expertise into real, differentiated value for developers on its cloud.

Top 8 Debian-Based Distros

Most people tend to forget that despite Ubuntu's success over the years, it's still just a distro based on another distro - Debian. Debian on its own, however, isn't really well suited for newer users...hence the explosion of distros based on Debian over the recent years. There are lot of great choices for Linux users. Which one is best for you?

Compact, rugged IoT gateway offers dual GbE with PoE

Inforce has launched a $250 “Inforce 6320” IoT gateway that runs Linux on a quad -A53 Snapdragon 410, and offers WiFi, BT, GPS, HDMI, USB, -30 to 85°C support, and dual GbE ports with PoE.
Inforce Computing’s $250 Inforce 6320 is a compact (170 x 95 x 42mm) IoT gateway that runs Ubuntu Core (Snappy) and Debian on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 410E. Inforce promises “periodic upstream kernel based BSP releases [that] include in-depth documentation along with a host of royalty-free software.” The Debian BSP includes LXDE, drivers for all available interfaces, as and access to the Inforce TechWeb tech support services.